


Consumed by Ashes

by devilinthedetails



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Anger, Death, F/M, Fear, Gen, Hate, Loss, Redemption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-27
Updated: 2019-10-27
Packaged: 2021-01-04 14:47:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21199409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devilinthedetails/pseuds/devilinthedetails
Summary: Anakin is consumed by fire and ashes.





	Consumed by Ashes

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Songs of the English Restoration Theater Challenge at Jedi Council Forums. My prompt was "I burn, I burn" by John Eccles. Parts appearing in parenthesis are lyrics from the song I have incorporated into my story and used as inspiration for this fic.

Consumed to Ashes

(I burn, I burn, my brain consumes to ashes…) 

“It’s over, Anakin.” Obi-Wan’s voice was raised in warning—in prohibition—as it always was when he told Anakin he couldn’t do something that Anakin knew in his bones he could do, but Obi-Wan wasn’t his Master any more. Obi-Wan couldn’t forbid him from anything. Obi-Wan’s lack of faith in his abilities couldn’t hold him back any longer. Obi-Wan had underestimated his powers for the last time, and that didn’t grieve him so much as it freed him. “I have the high ground.” 

“You underestimate my power.” Anakin didn’t spare a glance at the terrain—at the sooty hill Obi-Wan had leapt onto seconds ago. The terrain was just another limiting factor that could no longer limit him. It, like Obi-Wan, would be powerless before the raw strength of his finally unleashed power. 

“Don’t try it.” Obi-Wan gave a slight head shake, his tone that of a man trying to be reasonable while the galaxy burned around him, but Anakin didn’t want to be reasonable, and had never wanted to be reasonable. Obi-Wan had always just been too blind to see that, the fool…How could Anakin have ever thought him wise when he failed to see what was in front of his own eyes? 

He opened his mouth in a great battle cry, releasing the fear and rage that blazed in his belly, as he lunged over the Mustafarian lava toward the man he had once called Master. Before his lightsaber could make contact with Obi-Wan’s, he felt fire—hotter than the lava he had jumped across—slice through him. 

It felt like every cell in his body was burning as he fell and rolled across the scorched ground of Mustafar. His howl as it escaped his scratched, parched throat sounded like it had come from a monster, not from him. Part of him couldn’t believe that he had been struck down by the man who had trained him and been like a father and a brother to him, but then another part of him hissed that he had always known it must be him who would destroy his Master or his Master who would destroy him. No enemy could defeat Skywalker and Kenobi, so naturally one would have to kill the other…

“You were the Chosen One.” Obi-Wan had begun to lecture as he always did, and Anakin had never felt such fiery, all-consuming loathing for him as he did now. How could Obi-Wan think he was so righteous when Anakin was scrabbling in burning soot because of Obi-Wan and Obi-Wan wasn’t even lifting a finger to help him. “It was said that you would destroy the Sith, not join them! Bring balance to the Force, not leave it in darkness!” 

Flaming tears filled Anakin’s eyes. Obi-Wan was still too understand that he had only done what he had to do to save Padme because he couldn’t bear to lose her. He was too blind to see that it had been love, not hatred, that motivated him, but Obi-Wan had always ignored Anakin’s love for Padme. Was it any wonder that ignoring had brought them to a duel to the death on this wretched world? 

Obi-Wan was walking away, leaving Anakin to die alone. He was abandoning him to die in agony without even the final grace of a mercy kill. 

It was this last unforgivable betrayal of being left to suffer what he had always feared the most—death—alone that made him shout with all the fire consuming his lungs to ash, “I hate you!” 

The blaze inside him hoped that Obi-Wan would break the Jedi Code. Would at last admit to the antipathy he had always held for Anakin. Would confess to being jealous of Anakin’s powers since the moment they met. Would scream how threatened he had felt ever since Anakin had first appeared before the Council and Qui-Gon had tried to replace Obi-Wan with him. It would prove that Obi-Wan, the perfect Jedi, was truly no better than him—was just as filled with hatred and rage. 

“You were my brother, Anakin!” Somehow Obi-Wan’s words burned more than his lightsaber. It was hard to deny that kinship no matter how much the blazing bitterness inside Anakin wanted to try. “I loved you!” 

Every millimeter of his skin scorching, Anakin wished he could retort that if Obi-Wan had ever loved him, he would never leave him in such a state, but Anakin knew with a certainty that had been burned into him like lava that beings always destroyed what they loved. That was why, he understood with an epiphany like lightning striking an unlucky tree, the Jedi forbade falling in love. It was too dangerous and destructive. It burned with the unquenchable fury of a thousand suns, and as it consumed him, he remembered curling against Padme’s soft warmth beneath blankets as the morning sun rose muja over the gleaming gray skytowers of Coruscant…

(Each eyeball too like lightning flashes…) 

Anakin’s comlink buzzed on the nightside table, and he fumbled for it, mumbling some choice words in Huttsee that offered unflattering assessments of the ancestry of whoever had dared to disturb his slumber while he slept beside his wife after too many months spent apart from her on the front. 

He grumbled something indistinct into his comlink as he accepted the call because it was far too early to even attempt graciousness. 

“Anakin.” Obi-Wan sounded sharply awake. “Where are you?” 

“On a sleep coach.” Anakin didn’t mention that it was Padme’s sleep coach, not his own, to which he was referring. “Taking a well-deserved rest after months of risking my life for the Republic on the front.” 

“I was afraid you’d say that.” Obi-Wan emitted a sigh that usually meant he was trying and mostly failing to be patient with Anakin. “Have you forgotten the Council wanted you to be present for a briefing on the progress of the Outer Rim Sieges fifteen minutes ago?” 

“I hadn’t forgotten.” Anakin reluctantly rolled out from beneath the blankets. “I’m just running fashionably late. I’ll be there within the half hour.” 

“Please make sure you are. I’m tired of making excuses for your inability to read a chrono to the rest of the Council.” Obi-Wan’s words were clipped as he ended the transmission before Anakin could apologize or retort, which might have been just as well since Anakin’s brain was too muddled to know which one he wanted to do. 

“That was Obi-Wan,” Anakin explained to Padme, who was stirring beside him. “I need to go to a briefing on the Outer Rim Sieges, but you should go back to sleep.” 

“I want a kiss before you go.” Padme gazed up at him with warm brown eyes that always made him feel on fire in the best possible manner. It was a lightning attraction shot like bolts from her eyes that drew him to her, he always thought. When he bent to oblige her, kissing her first on the forehead and then on the lips, she murmured, “There. Now I can spend all day thinking about how I was kissed by a hero of the Republic.” 

“I wish you wouldn’t call me a hero of the Republic.” Anakin turned away from her as he began gathering up the robes he had left in a pile on her floor. He would just have to wear them a second day in a row regardless of how rumpled they might be. “It reminds me of the war, and I want to forget it when I’m with you.” 

“You were always a hero in my eyes even before the war.” Padme’s gaze twinkled at him as she watched him throw on the Jedi robes that meant duty was calling him away from her again. “Do you know why?” 

“Because I’m dashingly brave.” Anakin chuckled. “And I can do things nobody else can.” 

“No.” Now it was Padme who leaned forward to kiss his eyelids, lighting fires in his eyes. “I’ve considered you a hero since you were a little boy because you did selfless things, and that’s what heroes always do, Anakin.” 

“I do feel pretty selfless leaving the joy of your presence to attend a boring briefing on Outer Rim Sieges.” Anakin gave her a final lopsided grin as he left, hoping that Obi-Wan had at least been kind enough to save a caf for him so his eyelids wouldn’t droop all through the meeting.

(Within my breast, there glows a solid fire, which in a thousand ages can’t expire.) 

Anakin watched the candles that had lit their dinner slowly flicker out on the table behind them as he and Padme swayed to a love song about a couple separated by war. It had become popular from one spiral arm of the galaxy to the other as the Clone Wars waged, but like a million other couples scattered across the stars, he and Padme pretended that it was their song alone because it seemed to speak to them—to their separation—alone. 

“I never want to leave you, you know.” Anakin buried his nose in the floral fragrance of Padme’s hair, feeling a fire—a burning desire to always be with her—blaze in his chest. 

“I know,” Padme whispered, cooling the flames that licked at his innards as only she could do. “You don’t need to worry about leaving me, though. You’re always with me even when duty keeps us apart. The memory of you has been burned into my heart.” 

Those words whispered into his chest made him believe that she was on fire for him as much as he was for her, and he smiled as he brushed his lips across her hair, tasting Naboo flowers. 

(’Tis sultry, sultry weather, pour ‘em all on my soul, it will hiss like a coal, but never be the cooler…) 

Anakin stood beside his new wife on the balcony with Naboo’s gorgeous Lake Country sprawled beneath him like a blanket. The water below him shimmered with the orange and red fire of the setting sun, while the meadows and mountains behind the lake burned like embers in a hearth beside which lovers might entwine themselves. 

“The galaxy is so beautiful and peaceful, isn’t it?” Padme’s breath tickled Anakin’s ear as she asked this question that seemed to be rhetorical or at least an invitation for nothing short of agreement. 

“How can you say that after the ugliness and death we saw on Tatooine and Geonosis? How can you say that when war has just broken out?” Anakin shook his head in disbelief at Padme’s idealism as he remembered cradling his dead mother in his arms and the rage that had swallowed him until every Tusken Raider lay lifeless in a pool of blood that stained the golden sand scarlet as his grief. He had seen the same sickening taint to the sand on Geonosis as so many of his fellow Jedi were slaughtered trying to save him and Obi-Wan…

“It’s not the galaxy that is anything less than beautiful or peaceful.” Padme squeezed the one wrist of flesh and blood that he had left, igniting a flame of desire deep in his chest. “It’s what sentient beings in their destructive folly are doing to it.” 

Anakin, mouth dry as if desire had burned every drop of moisture from it, found he couldn’t argue with that. His wife, he decided, was far more articulate than him. 

(’Twas pride hot as hell that first made me rebel…) 

“How can you be so unafraid to die?” Anakin’s eyes riveted on the bulge of Padme’s pregnancy after she again declared herself to be uncowed by the prospect of her own death. 

“How can you fight so many battles without being afraid that you’ll die?” Padme arched an eyebrow, answering his question with one of her own. 

“Because I never believe I’m going to die.” Anakin blazed with a defiance and pride he knew was unbefitting of a Jedi who should have accepted death—both his own and others like Padme—but the thought of passively accepting death instead of raging against it with every particle of his being made him want to retch. “Because I believe that through the Force I can be stronger than death.” 

“It’s different for me.” Padme’s brow knotted as if he had said the wrong thing, and Anakin felt his stomach tighten. “I’m not afraid to die because I’ve done everything that I wanted.” 

Her gaze pierced into Anakin for a moment, and Anakin felt his cheeks burn with either shame or desire, he couldn’t be sure which in the confusion her unflinching acceptance of her own ceasing to be had ignited within him. Then her worried face smoothed into a smile as she trailed kisses along his neck as she went on, “I’ve lived and I’ve loved you, Anakin, and loving you was more than I ever thought it could be.” 

Anakin’s tongue felt as if it was swelling in his mouth, preventing him from being able to say that was why he couldn’t lose her as he had lost his mother. 

As if she could read his thoughts, Padme cupped his chin between her palms. “You don’t need to try to save me. I made my peace with death before we met—when I was fourteen and the Trade Federation invaded my world.” 

“But you kept fighting.” Anakin’s jaw dropped in disbelief at her words, because he couldn’t fathom how a woman as determined as Padme could surrender to death so simply. 

“I fought to save my people.” She pulled his mouth against hers until their lips danced across each other like flames. “Not to save myself.” 

Anakin wanted to reply that he wished she would fight to save herself but her kisses had swallowed his words as a fire consumed wood. 

(From love’s awful throne, a cursed angel I fell and mourn now the fate which myself did create.) 

Steam engulfed him and the black suit that imprisoned him as the voice he hated and feared above all others demanded, “Lord Vader, can you hear me?” 

The sound of his new name was repugnant to him. As repugnant as his heavy breathing, which he was sure must have been loud enough to be heard from star systems away. The breathing, he thought, was heavy as if to match the clunkiness of his suit. He, who had always been so graceful in flying and fighting, would now be reduced to the cumbersome bulk of this suit. It made him want to howl against the injustice of the universe that had taken so much from him. 

“Yes, Master.” Hatred and bitterness was carved into every syllable because hatred and bitterness was all he had left after Mustafar. Unless…a fragile hope blazed within him…unless Padme had survived his choking her. He turned his head to his new Master, whom he despised as much as his old one. “Where is Padme? Is she safe? Is she all right?” 

She was the one he had gone to the Dark Side for, the one he had slaughtered younglings to save, the one whose life he had bought with his imprisonment in this terrible suit. 

“It seems in your anger you killed her.” He hated that answer with every fiber of what was left of his being because he wanted it to be a lie but knew it to be the horrible truth. He had reached out to choke her because she had rejected his sacrifice for her, because she had betrayed him to Obi-Wan, and because she had chosen to believe Obi-Wan instead of him. She had abandoned him by bringing Obi-Wan to kill him, and then she had abandoned him again by dying. 

“I-I couldn’t have.” He remembered her being alive when Obi-Wan had yelled at him to let her go, and he had obeyed that stern, unyielding tone out of instinct before he recalled that he didn’t owe Obi-Wan an apprentice’s obedience any more because he had a newer, darker Master. He had felt her life, her pulse, inside him even after he had choked her. She had been crying out for him while he lay in darkness, consumed by fire. “I felt it.” 

Rage at the lie—at the truth—at her death—at losing her even before her death filled him, and he vented his fury on the medical droids that had trapped him in this nightmarish suit. Clenching his fists, he used the Force to free himself from the gurney where he was strapped and finally let loose his howl of mingled acceptance and denial, “NO!” 

That cry echoed in his head years later on the Death Star as he watched his son on the cusp of death and realized that he wasn’t going to let the Dark Side claim another person he loved, a child whose love and faith reminded him so much of Padme that it broke the heart he thought had turned into stone in his chest…

(Adieu, adieu, transporting joys. Off, off, ye vain fantastic toys.) 

“I never thought I’d be able to attend my own funeral.” A ghost in the forests of Endor, Anakin watched as fire and ash consumed him. 

“Few people have the opportunity.” Obi-Wan gave a gentle grin as if their friendship had never been interrupted by a duel to the death on Mustafar or Anakin killing Obi-Wan on a Death Star that Anakin had always known was insignificant next to the power of the Force. 

“I’m burning but it doesn’t hurt.” Anakin thought the fire licking through his body should have been a painful, purging fire, but he didn’t feel it at all. He felt nothing but peace he had never known in life now that he was dead. Perhaps that was what it meant to become one with the Force after years of struggling against his destiny. 

“You’re not burning.” Obi-Wan corrected him, and Anakin, a willing apprentice once more, didn’t bristle. “The empty shell of your body is burning, but your spirit—your true self—is beyond suffering.” 

“Beyond suffering,” Anakin agreed, thinking that he would only linger long enough to say farewell to his son before fading into the Force with Obi-Wan to have his energy reused by the Force as Padme’s had been. “At peace at last.”


End file.
